I seem to have become addicted to "new".....and height is that even Facebook also doesn't seem to do it for me anymore. So much so that today I glanced at my long forgotten social network Orkut!!
Looking at Orkut a few things about Facebook's social success became very obvious. Facebook understood human social behaviour better than Orkut did...and it went about including the web in more open ways than Orkut. Ubiquitous "like" button we take for granted today is the bedrock of Facebook's success. It filled that gap of not having to write but also showing appreciation, solidarity .. plain and simple like!! It made the ways/tools available to websites and users for "Liking" effortlessly. Orkut was good as technology and thats why it became so popular in India, until Facebook arrived.
Google+ had so much promise and it still has potential to create a different sort of network... not social.. but more private social sort of. Lets see how Google evolves this eco-system it has created. Google has assorted tools with which it is trying to build the social network whereas Facebook already has social mastered and is trying to add tools in it.
Twitter has been fascinating in the meantime ... it is source of breaking news for me ... lets say it is my social news network.
Nothing else seems path breaking on the horizon at the moment.... all new startups are trying to create tools to tap the power of Facebook & Twitter whereas Google has been left to do its own spadework.
Another interesting thing is the way these successful tech companies have slowly started owning alphabets and symbols..."B", "W", "G", "f", "t" .... race is on !